Performance Appraisals Essay

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Performance Appraisal

At my last organization, the performance appraisal process was driven primarily by the need of the organization to align my performance with the strategic objectives of the organization. Chandra (2004) does not note this as a major reason for conducting performance appraisals, yet it is quite common in the business world. Health care organizations are, in this country, businesses. They will all have strategic missions, and within those missions all of the different tasks that support the mission and its related objectives will be broken down. That is a fundamental role of any human resource department, to understand what the different jobs are that need to be done, and to find the right people to do those jobs.

And so I feel that my performance appraisals were generally well-aligned with this perspective of the performance appraisal process. It was not explicitly stated as such, but the performance appraisal covered a number of significant issues, all of them relating to my job. The job description was used as the basis for setting objectives for the half-year, and then I was evaluated against these objectives. The organization sets performance measures for each job within the organization, and uses these as the basis for its performance evaluations. The job descriptions themselves are directly tied to the organization's strategy objectives, which is why I say that my performance evaluation was related to these objectives. The performance evaluation was directly related to the ways in which I was expected to contribute in the course of my position to the overall strategic objectives.

To me, this is an incredible advantage, for several reasons. The first is that the performance objectives on which the appraisal are based are realistic, measurable and achievable, which are the key attributes of any effective objective. I was able to, with hard work, meet these performance objective. Now, my sense that this was an advantage is not based on the fact that I received a good appraisal, but more on the fact that I knew what to expect, I knew what my contribution to the organization's overall strategic performance was, and I knew what I needed to do in order to achieve these objectives. That is the sign of a well-run organization and a well-conceived system of performance appraisal.

Chandra does make the point that performance appraisals are used by health care organizations to correct employee performance and stimulate improvement. I can imagine that if I had not been successful, the performance appraisal would have been proof positive of that failure. But the performance appraisal is simply a means to communicate that you have not performed to expectations; it is not a pathway to correcting behavior. It might be the first stone on that pathway, but training is how you make people better, who maybe have not met the expectations that have been placed upon them.

To promote career planning is something else that Chandra mentioned. I actually did not find that was part of the evaluation. I feel that it could have been. At the very least, a performance evaluation provides a venue for supervisors to talk directly with their employees, which to me is a pretty good opportunity to have a conversation about career paths. So if there was, at the end of the performance appraisal, an opportunity to have such a conversation, it didn't happen. Such a conversation would not be part of the appraisal itself, which was based almost entirely on numeric performance -- things that can be accurately measured -- but an informal discussion about one's career options based on the performance appraisal is, in my view, a way that the organization could improve the performance appraisal process.

Chandra also notes that the performance appraisal process has value in terms of determining wage/salary and personnel issues. On the latter, absolutely, as it is the place where sub-par performance is identified and addressed directly with the employee. The terms of employment, however, will be how the organization dictates the link between performance and wage/salary. In my view, there should be a link, and stronger performers should receive better wage/salary increases than their underperforming peers, but not all organizations work that way. I knew there was at least some link for me, and received the maximum increase on the basis of my positive reviews, but most people in the organization also received the same maximum increase, and those who maybe did not were the ones who were clearly underperforming.

360 Degrees

A 360 degree evaluation is a situation where one receives feedback in their performance review from not just a supervisor but a number of people with whom one works.

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Personally, I have never experienced this. So I have no experienced this, in any role.

I am not sure if this type of evaluation has any advantages. On paper, knowing that one has such evaluations is supposed to spur better behavior, in other words not just orienting one to focus on individual performance but to ensure that said performance does not come at the expense of team results, since that will be revealed in an evaluation that is also conducted by teammates. But I wonder if this is not just a crutch for managers who do not know their workers or their workplaces. If a manager is not aware of selfish or negative behavior on the part of a worker, then is that manager really doing his/her job?

There are many disadvantages quite evident, conceptually, in the idea of the 360 feedback model. First, it is inherently a Prisoner's Dilemma. People might think that avoiding negative comments will keep the peace better, so feedback might not be honest; or as in the Dilemma, they might all turn on each other. But an even bigger issue is that you are receiving feedback from people who are not trained in evaluation, who do not know what your job specifications are, and this opens the door to an incredible amount of subjective information, inaccurate assessments and other such noise. Your evaluation might end up having nothing to do with your actual performance against the measures set out in your job description (Jackson, 2012). Conceptually, it is pretty much the antithesis of a well-designed performance appraisal system -- at its best it replicates what a professional feedback system would, and there is no upside beyond that, and it introduces tremendous downsides to the process.

I would say that there are no advantages to this type of feedback vs. feedback from a competent, trained supervisor. An incompetent supervisor will not be able to know their employees well enough to give effective feedback, but arguing that 360 is better than a bad boss is just lowering the bar for a fundamentally-flawed feedback mechanism.

The reality is that the only good feedback system is one based on numbers. When the numbers are based on reasonable expectations of performance, based on past performance and the performance of your peers on average, and the employee is trained on the skills that are going to be measured, then you have a good feedback system. The employee knows what needs to be done, has been given the tools to do it, and then goes out at does it. With 360 degree feedback, such objectivity simply does not exist. Among your peers, the feedback is little more than a Prisoner's Dilemma, or worse a popularity contest. But do your peers know what you do? Or what you are supposed to do? They are not in an proper position to evaluate your contributions, based on that alone. Imagine a worker trying to do two jobs because of cutbacks, and performing relatively poorly against both of them. The numbers will not lie -- the evaluator will know that the person's workload is much higher than it is supposed to be, and that can be taken into account. In a 360 evaluation, people just see someone struggling. If they like the person, they will let them off the hook; if they do not, the feedback will be negative and most probably personal.

Anything that introduces subjectivity to the performance evaluation process needs to have a significant upside. Compared with a good supervisor who knows their employees, their jobs, and works with them every day, 360 feedback introduces an incredible amount of subjectivity. Furthermore, when conclusions are not backed by data, they are inherently weaker. The entire point of having the human resources department outline jobs that specifically need to be done in order to help the organization meet its strategic objectives is that the performance appraisals can be objective, supported by irrefutable facts, based on performance objectives that were identified to the worker prior ot the start of the evaluation period. Everything about the process seeks to remove bias and directly measure the employee against their expected contribution to the organization's strategic objectives. There are no attributes of 360 feedback that meet these criteria.

360 feedback can also be evaluated against Chandra's ideas of what a good performance appraisal system should have.….....

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